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The Chatbots and Agents Are Going To Merge
Could the AI labs intuit your next move and accomplish it for you? That seems to be where they're heading.
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There are two core generative AI uses today: Chatbots and agents. The bots make sense of information. The agents take control of your computer and get things done for you. The two seem distinct, but they’ll likely soon merge.
When you use a chatbot to research hotels, experiences, or companies, the bot, with your permission, will one day almost certainly take control of your browser to reserve a room for you, email a service provider for more information, or even purchase a company’s stock. The bot will suggest these actions as you chat with it. Then, upon approval, it will take command and get to work.
Today’s AI labs, already seeing the value of autonomous actions in coding, view you leaving the chat window as somewhat unnecessary, and they seem ready to complete the circuit. They want their chatbots, effectively, to intuit your next move and accomplish it for you.
OpenAI, for instance, is building a ‘super app’ for autonomous coding in Codex, but that concept may soon broaden beyond code. The updated Codex app includes an autonomous coding tool, a browser it can make use of, and an instance of ChatGPT. But the ambition extends to the core ChatGPT application itself.
“We are busy bringing ChatGPT to Codex so that we can bring Codex to ChatGPT,” said OpenAI engineer Thibault Sottiaux on X recently. “One day this will make sense.”
When you’re researching a service, let’s say a child’s birthday party entertainer, ChatGPT might, for instance, suggest some possible hires and then compose and send emails to them inquiring about availability and price. If the clown or magician meets your specifications, the bot could then confirm them, and maybe even run a background check. Just set the parameters, approve the language, and move on to your next chat.
Chatbot actions may soon extend far beyond today’s conceivable use cases, potentially to areas like stock trading. Robinhood, for example, just built an integration that allows users to delegate their trading decisions to AI bots. But soon, when researching a company in a chatbot, the bot might offer to buy shares for you. It might even help shape an investment strategy, get a budget, and execute it while you wait.
Boris Cherney, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, told me on Big Technology Podcast last week that the company is experimenting with more proactive versions of its Claude chatbot. “We’re trying all these different experiments,” he said. “There’s some stuff that we’re trying that’s like this.”
To be sure, this product vision will only be realized if people trust the AI labs to do the right thing with their data. And given the polling right now, that could be tough.
But chatbots that go beyond the chat window are certainly on their way. And should they catch on, they will have a profound impact on the web and the services built around it, potentially becoming central hubs for all computing. Outside websites and apps would be there for fact checking and triple confirming certain details only.
The term ‘super app,’ though initially sounding like a misnomer, is therefore the right way to describe the ambition. In places like China, a super app is a social network, payments tool, and ride hailing service, all in one. The new agent-chatbots could sync with all the same programs, and potentially do much more. This is the bull case for generative AI, and it’s not a totally inconceivable story. It’s likely the narrative OpenAI and Anthropic will take to Wall Street en route to trillion-dollar IPOs.
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